by Greil Marcus
In this new world, the disconnected, seemingly meaningless words and pictures of Mémoires would make sense. They would make sense, first, as noise, a cacophony ripping up the syntax of social life—the syntax, as Debord put it in The Society of the Spectacle, of “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself.” As the noise grew, those words and pictures would begin to link up—as graffiti on countless walls, shouts coming out of thousands of mouths, even as familiar streets and buildings one suddenly saw as if never before—and then, with the old syntax broken, these things would make a second kind of sense. They would be experienced not as things at all, but as possibilities: elements of what Debord called “constructed situations.”
These would be “moments of life concretely, deliberately, and freely created,” each one “composed of gestures contained in a transitory decor,” the gestures the “product of the decor and of themselves,” in turn producing “other forms of decor, and other gestures.” Each situation would be an “ambient milieu” for a “game of events”; each would change its setting, and allow itself to be changed by it. The city would no longer be experienced as a scrim of commodities and power; it would be felt as a field of “psychogeography,” and this would be an epistemology of everyday time and space, allowing one to understand, and transform, “the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
Now the city would move like a map you were drawing; now you would begin to live your life like a book you were writing. Called forth by a street or a building, an ensemble of gestures might imply that a different street had to be found, that a building could be redesigned by the gestures performed within it, that new gestures had to be made, even that an unknown city had to be built or an old one overthrown. “One night, as evening fell,” Raoul Vaneigem wrote in The Revolution of Everyday Life,
my friends and I wandered into the Palais de Justice in Brussels. The building is a monstrosity, crushing the poor quarters beneath it and standing guard over the fashionable Avenue Louise—out of which, someday, we will make a breathtakingly beautiful wasteland. As we drifted through the labyrinth of corridors, staircases, and suite after suite of rooms, we discussed what could be done to make the place habitable; for a time we occupied the enemy’s territory; through the power of our imagination we transformed the thieves’ den into a fantastic funfair, into a sunny pleasure dome, where the most amazing adventures would, for the first time, be really lived.
This was a daydream, Vaneigem cheerfully admitted—but “daydreaming subverts the world.” When this free field was finally opened by the noise of the exploding syntax, when the fall of the dictionary left all words lying in the streets, when men and women rushed to pick them up and make pictures out of them, such daydreams would find themselves empowered, turning into catalysts for new passions, new acts, new events: situations, “made to be lived by their creators,” a whole new way of being in the world. These situations would make a third kind of sense: they would seem sui generis, unencumbered by the baggage of any past, opening always into other situations, and into the new kind of history it would be theirs to make. And this would be a history not of great men, or of the monuments they had left behind, but a history of moments: the sort of moments everyone once passed through without consciousness and that, now, everyone would consciously create.
As Debord told the tale in Mémoires, this story was itself sui generis. Earlier variants were present in his pages—from the surrealists’ discovery of urban “magnetic fields” in the 1920s to Thomas De Quincey’s wanderings through London in the early nineteenth century, back even to the “Carte de Tendre” (Map of Feeling) of the seventeenth-century précieuses—but as blind baggage, which means “sealed book.” That was what the past ought to be, Mémoires said: would be, if the unidentified young men and women pictured in Debord’s pages, framed by Jorn’s blazing colors, could someday supersede dead time. Or had they already done it? Here, as if for the first time, the unnamed band moving from 1952 through 1953 was discovering that a world of permanent novelty could exist, and finding the means to start it up. These means were two: the “dérive,” a drift down city streets in search of signs of attraction or repulsion, and “détournement,” the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one’s own devise. Mémoires, with its meandering crossings and stolen words and pictures, was a version of both—just as both were art forms that, the LI believed, could not produce art but only a new kind of life.
As the half-century turned, the delinquent intellectuals of the LI saw the culture and commerce of the West as exiled Frankfurt School critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had seen it at the end of the Second World War: a single system of suffocation and domination, “uniform as a whole and in every part.” As a benign match for the Stalinism of the East, capitalism completed a double reflection, which reduced everything outside itself to a nullity. With the world governed by what Harold Rosenberg called “the power trance,” art was put forward as the last redoubt of creativity and critical will, the note sounded with echoes of Thermopylae or the Charge of the Light Brigade: “What can fifty do,” Clement Greenberg wrote in 1947 of the New York abstract painters, “against a hundred and forty million?”
Such a cry sounds hysterical today, if it didn’t then; the rest of the United States was not against Greenberg’s fifty, it ignored them, and it had its reasons. The members of the LI had theirs. They had found their affinity in art, in a love of what art promised and a hatred for where those promises stopped, for the separate and privileged realm society reserved for beautiful, impotent dreams—but even the beauty, they thought, had been a lie for thirty years, before any of them were born. Somewhere between 1915 and 1925 art burned itself out in a war against its own limits, in a struggle to escape its redoubt, its museum, its amusement park, its zoo; since then there had been no art, only “imitations of ruins” in a “dismal yet profitable carnival, where each cliché had its disciples, each regression its admirers, every remake its fans.” The LI’s dreams of a reinvented world came from art, but the group was sure that, in its time, to make art was to lose its time; to claim an image or a line as one’s own, as a unique and eternal mark on the wall of a history written in advance, would be to perpetuate a fraud on the history the group meant to make. It would be to buy into myths of blessed genius and divine inspiration, to lend one’s hands to a system of individual hierarchy and social control; with God dead and art standing in his stead, it would be to maintain a religious illusion, fittingly trapped in the most magical of commodities. It would be to hold up heaven in a frame instead of pointing to it in the sky like a priest—and what was the difference? To make art would be to betray the common, buried wishes art once spoke for, but to practice détournement—to write new speech balloons for newspaper comic strips, or for that matter old masters, to insist simultaneously on a “devaluation” of art and its “reinvestment” in a new kind of social speech, a “communication containing its own criticism,” a technique that could not mystify because its very form was a demystification—and to pursue the dérive—to give yourself up to the promises of the city, and then to find them wanting—to drift through the city, allowing its signs to divert, to “detourn,” your steps, and then to divert those signs yourself, forcing them to give up routes that never existed before—there would be no end to it. It would be to begin to live a truly modern way of life, made out of pavement and pictures, words and weather: a way of life anyone could understand and anyone could use.
Illustrations from “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s,” I.S. no. 3, December 1959
“Their underlying philosophy,” Christopher Gray wrote of the LI in Leaving the 20th Century, “was one of experiment and play”—but play with all of culture, and the city itself as the field. Why not? “Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added to you,” Hegel said; it was time for the kingdom, past
time. “Suffice it to say that in our view the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as on the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot,” Debord and Gil J Wolman wrote for the LI in 1956. To the LI, what Hannah Arendt called the social question—hunger, the necessity of the body driving back the will to found freedom, a force that left every revolution promising the Kingdom of God defeated or travestied, short even of food and clothing—had, at least potentially, been solved. As the LI read the signs of postwar technics and abundance, as it read the ads, from now on anyone suffering privation would be a victim not of necessity but of a power trance, a trance that could be broken. Modern poverty was a poverty of passion, rooted in the predictability of a world society rich enough to manage both space and time—so the group dismissed capitalism as an empty present, socialism as a future equipped to change only the past, and spoke instead of building “castles of adventure.” Walking the streets until they were too drunk to know which corner to turn, they tried to drive themselves into delirium, in order to emerge with a message of seduction: thus in 1953 Ivan Chtcheglov, nineteen, wrote a “Formula for a New Urbanism,” and called on his comrades to create their first city, “the intellectual capital of the world,” a sort of Fourierist Las Vegas, a surrealist Disneyland, an amusement park where people would actually live, a ville de tendre with districts and gardens corresponding “to the whole spectrum of feelings one encounters by chance in everyday life,” constructed realms of romance, confusion, utility, tragedy, history, terror, happiness, death, a city where “the principal activity of the inhabitants” would be “the CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE,” a drift through a landscape of “buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing emotions, forces, and events from the past, the present, and the future. A rational extension of bygone religious systems, fairy tales, and above all of psychoanalysis into architectural expression becomes more urgent every day, as all the sparks of passion disappear,” Chtcheglov said—but in the city he imagined, “Everyone will live in his own cathedral. There will be rooms more conducive to visions than any drug, and houses where it will be impossible not to fall in love.”
Addressing himself only to the others in the LI, and for that matter writing under a pseudonym, “Gilles Ivain,” Chtcheglov was contriving a secret for his friends to share; at the same time he was writing a manifesto to change the world. “A mental disease has swept the planet,” he pronounced: “banalization . . . this state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal—the liberation of man from material cares—and has become an obsessive image hanging over the present. Offered the choice of love or a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal.” To choose the garbage disposal was to embrace reification, to become a garbage disposal. But to choose love was to escape the prison of the alienated self, and so Chtcheglov’s lover, dreaming in his own cathedral, was not an isolate, not a babbling cripple hiding in his private Notre-Dame, but a citizen of a new world, ready to speak. He might say what the lover in Paul Auster’s 1986 mystery The Locked Room says: “By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well. My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.” This is utopia, and utopia means “nowhere,” but within the LI all obvious absurdities and impossibilities were shrugged off (who says you have to choose between love and a garbage disposal?); the LI’s project was the rational extension of the fairy tale. That utopia, the exact center of the world, was where the LI meant to live.
“Ultimately,” Gray wrote, “all that was involved was the simplest thing in the world: wanting to make your dreams come true. And its enemies were equally simple: sterile subjective fantasy on the one hand and, on the other, its objective counterpart: the world of art.” Someday one would confront the final enemy, the existing order; the first battle, as Alexander Trocchi wrote in London in 1964, trying to recapture his days as a member of the LI, was “to attack the ‘enemy’ at his base, within ourselves.” Thus the aesthetes of the LI forbid themselves to make art—and in the same spirit they forbid themselves to work. As a provisional microsociety, they meant to live out the future in the present—in a future-present where the tools of mastery already in place in the most advanced societies would sooner or later make work redundant and leisure unlimited. This was the material base on which they floated their vision of a world of constructed situations; drifting through Paris, they looked for that world, and for their next meal.
The LI believed that by replacing work and entertainment with the dérive, art with détournement, and the productive social roles still enforced by a society living in the past-present with a “role of pure consumption”—the consumption, the LI meant, of “its time”—it could “reinvent everything each day.” Reinvent everything, or lose everything—as Debord said in 1972 (when the LI, in its day a group known mostly to itself, was an experiment Debord could imagine only he remembered), “Time frightens . . . it is made of qualitative jumps, irreversible choices, occasions which will never return.”
That was the burden assumed by those who committed themselves to a life of permanent novelty. Each day the members of the LI would walk the streets not as prisoners of wages and prices, not as employees, shoppers, or tourists, but as travelers in a labyrinth revealed by their wish to find it. Each day they would case the spectacles of art and advertising, news and history, pillage bits and pieces, and make them speak in new tongues, in a counter-language, in every instance leaving a small hole in the great spectacle of social life, at least as it governed the group’s own space and time. Playing a “game of freedom”—a “systematic questioning,” Debord said, “of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness”—the LI would become “the masters and possessors of their own lives.”
It was in fact a desperate search, in a utopia that contained its own contradiction, product of a wish that at once went beyond art and found itself returned to it: “When freedom is practiced in a closed circle,” Debord wrote in 1959, looking back on the LI in his film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time), “it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself.” What looked like freedom might be no more than parole, Wolman wrote bitterly to the rest of the group in early 1953, after they rejected Debord’s plan for an attack on a girls’ reform school: “of course you dream at night if you can always sleep but life threatens there are cops at every turn and by the signs of the bistros the girls your age are scarred by youth.” It was a cruel search: “What was missing,” Debord said, “was felt as irretrievable. The extreme uncertainties of subsisting without working made excesses necessary and breaks definitive.” One after another, those who gathered around Debord were tossed out or dropped away. “Suicide carried off many,” he said in 1978, in his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, then quoting Mémoires as it had quoted Treasure Island: “ ‘Drink and the devil took care of the rest.’ ” But from 1952 to 1957, as long as the LI lasted, others always took their place. You can see them, the International fully present around a single table, as the idea was set forth once again: revolution begins in a wish for right, which is a wish for justice, which is a wish for harmony, which is a wish for beauty. We cannot live without beauty, but art can no longer provide it. Art is the lie we are no longer living, and it is the trick, the false promise of beauty, the compensation for the destruction of harmony and right, that keeps everyone else from living. As a trick art must be suppressed, and as a promise it must be realized—and that is the key to revolution. Art must be superseded, and we, who have suppressed art in our own space and time, can make it happen. The new beauty can only be a beauty of situ
ation, which is to say provisional, and lived . . .
“Preliminary Program to the Situationist Movement”—“This inscription, on a wall of the rue de Seine, can be traced back to the first months of 1953 (an adjacent inscription, inspired by more traditional politics, allows virtually complete accuracy in dating the graffiti in question: calling for a demonstration against General Ridgway, it cannot be later than May 1952). The inscription reproduced above seems to us one of the most important relics ever unearthed on the site of Saint-Germain-des-Prés: a testament to the particular way of life that tried to assert itself there.” I.S. no. 8, January 1963
The Situationist International was founded on the conviction that this closed circle could be opened: that this new world, at first the private, almost abstract discovery of a separate few, could be explored, explained, publicized, and glamorized, until the demand for it would become overwhelming. Overwhelming, and common, as the situationists linked that demand to the inchoate manifestations of refusal and revolt they were sighting all over the planet—manifestations, they were certain, of an unfathomed dissatisfaction with the quality of life in modern society, scattered bits of a negation of its idea of happiness. They had a plan: drawing the finest talent from across Europe, then from around the globe, the SI would devote itself simultaneously to “the ruthless criticism of all that exists” (Marx, 1843) and to “bringing to light forgotten desires, and creating entirely new ones” (Chtcheglov, 1953)—and then, the SI said in June 1958, in the first number of its journal Internationale situationniste, “we will wreck this world.” “Everyone must search for what he loves, for what attracts him,” they wrote then. On the way to the discovery of what you loved, you would find everything you hated, everything that blocked the way to what you loved. To walk down that street would be to find yourself on a terrain where the smallest obstacle demanded a total contestation of the existing order.
